Episode 4 of the Apprentice illustrated that failure to fulfil the key responsibility of a leader, setting the strategic direction for a group or organisation, can lead to misery.
The challenge was to make money by offering beauty treatments to shoppers in two of Birmingham’s largest shopping centres. Felicity Jackson, project leader on Logic – the losing team – was fired because she did not grasp the idea that selling high margin beauty treatments should be the focus of her group in the task. Instead she was sucked into trying to sell lower margin beauty products, was left with a huge amount of unsold stock and led her group to a financial loss. Not a way to impress Lord Sugar as he looks for someone who can make money for him.
Felicity seemed a pleasant enough person but could benefit from grounding in leadership training. Leadership is mainly about ensuring your team or organisation is doing the right things. Felicity demonstrated her lack of leadership expertise by failing to identify what the key task was. Instead she fell into the usual trap of inexperienced people, trying to exert authority over the team rather than listening to their ideas and concerns. There was sufficient knowledge in the team to have identified the right strategy if only Felicity had tapped into them.
The consequence of the poor strategy was that Felicity’s team chose a location with only one treatment room. They were competing with a team who had access to three treatment rooms that were also more conveniently situated close to the selling space in the shopping centre. It was almost game over before they started.
Getting the right strategy is of course only half the battle. Effective implementation of the strategy, or doing things right in my language, is also important.
Both teams flirted with going off strategy and trying to sell products rather than treatments but Zoe Beresford, project manager of team Venture, managed to keep her team more or less focussed on the task. Susan Ma did her best to try and take the team down a blind alley selling beauty lotions. Zoe was influenced by Susan and did invest in way too much stock but she at least limited Susan’s beauty lotion purchases. When the lotion idea came unstuck, Zoe very forcefully pinned responsibility for the excess beauty lotion stock and poor level of sales at Susan’s door (only 3 bottles of lotion were sold during the whole day). Whilst Zoe appeared overly aggressive in highlighting Susan’s mistake, she at least forced Susan to take responsibility for her actions.
It is a long road to the final, with twelve candidates still in the running. Who do you think is going to triumph? Vote here for the person you think will be the Apprentice winner.
By Jon Davies | Righttrack’s Digital Marketing Manager